At the end of the cold war, the Western block, commanded by the US, announced that history was coming to an end. There would be events, but nothing outside the capitalist market economy and liberal democracy. This was the end of history.

Neoliberal globalization was charged with making these economic and political schemes universal. The Pax Americana was imposed. But the shift from a bipolar world to a unipolar one under US imperial hegemony, did not bring peace or economic development. On the contrary, the hotspots of war have multiplied and the economic recession has turned global.

The recessive crisis at the centre of the system, begun in 2008, has no end in sight, nor a way to end it. The austerity policies assumed by all the European countries are machines for the generation of social and political instability, reducing the legitimacy of political systems and traditional parties.

Brexit was an evident expression of the unrest provoked by globalization, of which the election of Donald Trump is a confirmation. The rejection of the effects of neoliberal globalization is generalized. The governments and parties that insist in this direction are systematically defeated. The crisis of the corrosion of globalization also brings with it a crisis of liberal democracy that is losing legitimacy as it fails to express the sentiments of the majority of the population.

The end of history led to the end of neoliberalism, with the BRICS representing the horizon for surpassing it. More than a group of countries, BRICS has begun to trace a new international economic and political order, to substitute the one erected at the end of the Second World War, based on the World Bank, the IMF and the dollar.

When globalization shows its limits, condemning economies to endless stagnation, provoking the loss of the political systems based on it, this signals the closure of a historical period. Instead of what so many people have referred to as a supposed end of the cycle of progressive governments in Latin America, what we have is the real end of a cycle, with the exit of Great Britain from the European Union and the questions that Donald Trump poses to the Free Trade Treaties and other pillars of globalization.

Globalization has reached a point of exhaustion, without achieving renewed growth in the world economy; on the contrary, it has naturalized recession on a global scale. Nor has it diminished conflicts across the world, on the contrary, it has multiplied them.

The world that emerges from Brexit, from the election of Trump, from the profound crisis of the European Union and above all, from the BRICS, is a world in transition between that of the globalization commanded by the United States and its neoliberal model, and one which points toward mechanisms of reactivation of development, of the negotiated resolution to international conflicts, of strengthening nation States and regional integration processes and of South-South interchange.

At this moment, Latin America needs, more than ever, to advance the processes of integration and, above all, to create closer links with BRICS and its reserve fund. Seeking instead to renew privileged links with the US would be to take an opposite route, which means condemning ourselves to recession, stepping away from the dynamic nuclei of the world economy, becoming inconsequential (on the world scene), as happened in the 1990s.

Precisely at the moment of the wearing down of globalization and the neoliberal model on a world scale, Argentina and Brazil are returning to this model, after its failures in these same countries in the 1990s. This is one more signal that we are facing options contrary to the global dynamics of the XXI Century.

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop)

- Emir Sader, Brazilian Sociologist and Political Scientist, is Coordinator of the Laboratory of Public Policy of the State University of Río de Janeiro (UERJ).